Here's the caveat: Even if you have a gadget to tell you when you're sugar's ready, leaving a pot of boiling sugar alone for more than a millisecond is a bad, bad idea, as anyone who's done it can tell you (myself included).

One retired New York bomb guy said it came within a "millisecond" of creating a fireball 30 feet high that could've killed hundreds of people and "caused horrific lung damage and fried the hair and faces of anyone within a 50-yard radius."